Massachusetts College of Art and Design - Palette and Pen Yearbook (Boston, MA)

Page 31 text:

Painted initials of other classes decorate our intricate little forest of easels; we ' ve added ours. Suddenly, with the breath of June, we know what it means: that we are going too, leaving the paint marked cubicles which have been cloak and core of winter existence for two elective years. If we could do it again . . . ? We know more now than when we began school, wanting to do covers like Rockwell, landscapes like Hibbard. Now we curl a lip at commerce, maybe, and turn to art circle sophistication. Yet if we could do it again . . . grope less, understand more . . . for we may need prosaic skill and even the sticky platitudes of commerce, attributes as hard to come by as he taesthetic attitude. That attitude is worthy, the restless world needs it more, yet with it alone we hastily turn to our Thoreau. How do we live cheaply on flour, Indian meal, and molasses? Can we make colors from earths and berry dyes? And what ' s this about rammed earth construction if no Irishman ' s shanty is handy for boards with which to build a shack? Or, in the withering stare of the Philistine do we too resolve to be SUCCESSFUL, murmuring with glazed eyes How bad can greeting card design get? and We must go to New York, the publishers are there! But perhaps we make this promise to Art: that we will not unnecessarily stir the im- potent stew of academic against modern, commercial against fine, but serve to extend the cognate field of all art so that, slowly, it will become a realized need of the people, not a thing revolving in its own decay of bickering, last-resort teaching, cut-throat commissions, and aesthetic paralysis. Let us love the original spirit of art, for one thing is sure: as paint- ers born we eye life differently, more despairingly sometimes, yet more happily and often more clearly than others. Warren Spaulding Elaine Biganess Lydia Breed Janet Doub Ruth Doyle Sally Fairbanks John Forster Carol Hanson Alice Kirby Jeanne Murphy Elinor Palmer Norman Palmstrom Elizabeth Patch Ruth Simonds Muriel Webber Virginia Wenzier Anne Levitsky Warren Spaulding Charles Walkup